Tim Lee makes the excellent point that the country already has some experience with the All Discretion to the Executive model of electronic surveillance that the GOP, the Blue Dog Caucus, The Washington Post and others seem so eager to implement:

Martin Luther King was the most famous of the dozens of anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, journalists, and other undesirables whose communications were bugged by the Johnson and Nixon administration. There’s no evidence that the Bush administration has done anything like that. But if we eliminate meaningful judicial oversight of the executive branch’s surveillance activities, there’s every reason to think that a future administration will.

And of course the absence of evidence about abusive uses of the illegal surveillance program may say more about our general ignorance of the program than about the administration’s probity. We know that the “rendition” program has been against innocent people and to extract false confessions designed to bolster bogus administration talking points about Iraq/al-Qaeda links, so there’s plenty of reason to worry. But even if Bush has conducted his secret illegal surveillance in the most ethical possible way to conduct secret illegal surveillance, Tim’s right to say that future administrations almost certainly won’t. Nixon’s gross abuses built on a platform of surveillance that grew slowly-but-surely over the decades across several different administrations.

Photo by Flickr user djbrady used under a Creative Commons license

I hadn’t realized that Greater DC has the country’s highest median income. Good for us!

I noticed something interesting when looking at Ed Kilgore’s trenchant remarks on Joe Lieberman’s recent SAIS speech:

It provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were “good” from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be “bad.” Democrats were “bad” from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were “good.” During the Clinton administration, and particularly with respect to the Kosovo intervention, Democrats were “good” and most Republicans (excepting Dole and McCain) were “bad,” and that characterization remained true during the 2000 elections (Lieberman’s running-mate Al Gore “good,” the humility-in-foreign-policy Bush “bad”). Both parties were “good” from 9/11 through the Iraq War authorization, but once the war began, Republicans were “good” and Democrats turned “bad” (presumably including Al Gore, who was prematurely “bad” in opposing the war).

One illustration of how dimwitted this worldview is, is that in Liebermanland the “good” political party is pretty much always and everywhere the party that was in power at the time. That’s because in the Joe Lieberman Handbook to Strategy, the test of your foreign policy acumen is just supporting wars. And, of course, presidents tend to only launch wars that they support. Thus at any given time, the incumbent will either be not starting a war (neutral) or else supporting his own policies (good) whereas the loudest opponents of his policies (bad) will be in the other party. The idea that there might be good and bad ways of using force, good or bad circumstances in which to use them, or heaven forbid other kinds of good policymaking (avoiding wars!) is just off the table.

Mark Weisbrot for CEPR makes the case for a cheaper dollar, arguing that when the Great and the Good like Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson argue for a “strong dollar” policy they’re arguing the interests of firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup rather than those of the majority of Americans.

Rosa Brooks says abortion is passé, the right’s new thing is torture: “Today, though, the GOP’s interest in abortion appears greatly diminished. When President Bush nominated Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general, no one seemed clear about Mukasey’s views on abortion — and no one in the GOP seemed to care very much either.” You can also look up the Ascent of Rudy in this regard.